Children’s author Joan Aiken writes that to be a children’s writer, you need imagination, iconoclasm, a deep instinctive morality, a large vocabulary, a sense of humor and a powerful sense of pity and justice. Rosemary Sutcliff has all that and more.
source: The English Journal, Vol. 74, No. 7 (Nov., 1985), pp. 83-84
Reading Sutcliff’s famous historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth helped enthuse University of Reading lecturer Matthew Nicholls as a child about Roman history. His article in The Guardian Notes and Queries led me to ask what it was about the famous novel which he found so ‘wonderful’
… I can remember reading The Eagle of the Ninth when I was about 7 or 8; at that age I was starting Latin at School and showing an interest in Romans, so my parents took me off to Wall near Lichfield where we lived and must have bought me the book too. It made a great impression, Read More »
The Sword and The Circle is the first part of The Eagle of the Ninth author Rosemary Sutcliff’s trilogy of tellings of the King Arthur legend. In the introduction she wrote about the real man Arthur.
Many people believe, as I do, that behind the legends of King Arthur as we know them today, there stands a real man. Read More »
The Eagle of the Ninth author Rosemary Sutcliff, children’s writer of historical fiction, has won the ‘highly prestigious’ Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) 2010 Phoenix Award in the USA – see here – for her historical novel The Shining Company. The prize is for a book which did not win awards when it first came out but whose reputation has grown over 20 years.Read More »
In 600 A.D., many years after King Arthur defeated the Saxons, the tribes of Britain are again threatened by invaders who are gaining strength in the East. Prosper and his loyal bondsman, Conn, answer the call of King Mynydogg to join the fighting forces of Prince Gorthyna and the highly skilled Shining Company.Read More »
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 